BHA: Causal powers of absences? and other things

["Caroline New" <c.new@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

As a first-time DPF reader (I did try) Im very grateful to Ruth for
distracting the attention of the list to a discussion on truth, and for
the ensuing detour re. irony, because this has allowed me to read
Chapter One and the beginning of Two and catch up with you.  Lets hope
you havent all lost interest!  But it seems to me the points Howard
raised, way back on his freeway ruminations, have not received the
attention they deserve, maybe because they are more critical of RBs
thesis than the points the list has focussed on since.  I disagree with
his earlier points but agree with the later ones.

Howard, you began by asking what has to be the case for you to imagine a
world of absence  only.  As you say, you have to be able to exist and to
perform feats of abstraction, and as you then say, this capacity has no
bearing on the existence of totally  no being unless it is accompanied
by some sort of explanation as to how something comes out of nothing...
and we have none such.  So what?  Isnt that the epistemic fallacy? We
dont have to be able to reconcile  the possibility of total non being
with the world as it actually is to admit its logical possibility  - and
thats all RB is asserting on p. 46.

I want to argue with your second point , too, where you suggest we could
have a totally positive world, with no gaps, as long as their
interaction with each other is perfectly choreographed... we can even
allow that they decay and are transformed...  This sent me back to the
passage at the top of p. 46.  I cant understand RBs point here that
non-atomicity... and /or action-at-a-distance are transcendentally
necessary features of an intelligible material object world.   Or
rather, I probably understand it, but I cant see what hes doing with
it.  Since we do have an intelligible material object world, we must
have non-atomicity and action at a distance.  But how is that an
argument against the LOGICAL impossibility of a totally positive world?
Do we need a transcendental argument for that, or for the logical
possibility of a null one?  In a later post Howard you seem to think we
do - for you point out that RB doesnt make one.  Without one, you say,
the statement that sheer indeterminate negativity is logically
possible is a statement without ontological purchase.  So?  Is there
something here I havent grasped?

 It seems to me that your argument, Howard, doesnt fall on the
impossibility of things moving and changing in a world without gaps
between them, but rather that it falls on the very possibility of this.
Because movement and change introduce absence in another guise, which
brings us back (as I think Colin said) to RBs argument on p. 45,
Change cannot be analysed in terms of difference because it presupposes
the idea of a continuing thing in a tensed process  - so as soon as you
introduce location and tense there must be absence - absence of what was
previously there.   For me the question remains of the different kinds
of negativity and absence that are being brought together in these
passages, and whether there is a misleading slippage between them.

Ill ignore your third (freeway) point about whether relations are
perceptible, which has been discussed, and rush on to your interesting
fourth point.  You asked:
.   In what sense is the absence of either the past or the future
real? ... clouds are a sign of rain to come because we know the
meteorological laws
that connect the one thing with another.  But we also know that... the
rain we
expect may never come.  In what sense is the rain absent in the
future real?  In what sense is any of the future real?  Real
absence exists as Pierre not being in the cafe.  Is the real
absence of the future different?  Is this a real absence that
doesn't exist?  In a later post you made related points: Still I read
for a realism
grounded in materialism and so questions of ontology, e.g. the
ontology of relations, become thorny ones.  As a consequence I
would welcome some attention to the concrete examples posed by Bhaskar
at the end of section 1.  Welcoming negativity to our ontology situates
some very
interesting possibilities, he says, and then, I take it, invites us
to welcome to our ontology the following, p48:  "the letter that
didn't arrive, the failed exam, the missed plane, the monsoon that
didn't occur, the deforestation of the Amazonian jungle, the holes
in the ozone layer, the collapse of 'actually existing socialism',
the spaces in the text, the absent authors and readers it
presupposes, both the too empty and the too full." You asked what the
causal efficacy of these absences was, by which we could establish their
reality.  Louis replied that the holes in the ozone layer have clear
causal implications, and maybe I made elaborate preparations for the
monsoon that never arrived....  Here I agree with you, Howard, or with
what I presume you to be saying.  Im not going to quarrel with RB
inviting us to welcome these absences to our ontology IN SOME SENSE.
But what sense?  I dont believe that absences can be causally
powerful.  Its only in a grammatical sense that the hole in the ozone
layer , rather than what it lets through,  has causal power.  My plans
for the monsoon were caused (among other things) by false beliefs, which
were good reasons (perhaps) for acting in certain ways.  The monsoon I
expected never came.  The monsoons absence is not like that of  Pierre,
who exists elsewhere, but more like that of a fictional character.  It
isnt the absent monsoon that has causal powers, but  the (positive)
weather that actually came... The disjunction between my expectations
(of monsoon) and the real weather have causal powers, if you like. Its
true that RB does refer to the impact and the effect of some of
these absences.  I would have thought merely that attending to absences
(like symptomatic silences) draws our attention to whats going on, by
distinguishing it from what might have, but has not, happened...
But I am left uneasily feeling that the various meanings of absence
and negation have been rhetorically but not substantively (!) linked.

Help, if you will,

Caroline











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